Last night Alana and I went to meet with my friend Yvette. I’ve know Yvette for over a decade but we’ve always hung out in group setting so I didn’t know much about her background. Shortly after I posted my op-ed Yvette contacted me to tell me that she was adopted and had been thinking a lot about it recently. As I want the film to explore how people coming from different family configurations struggle with identity issues I realized that it would be great to get them together.

It was an emotional discussion. Yvette’s tale of her adoption was complex and very different from Alana’s DC background, yet there were many similiarites between their desire to know their roots. Both of them had travelled to the country of their father’s origin and had found a sense of connectedness with the people around them- in Alana’s case in Poland- and in Yvette’s in Armenia.

Yvette’s father was an Iranian exchange student but making a visit to Iran proved much more difficult than travelling to Armenia which was once a part of Iran- so close enough.

Suki and i were discussing how to put the film together this morning. It’s a very different project than other things we’ve worked on as it won’t be as direct. in some ways this should make it easier for me- as I can see using voice over to tie scenes together- and pull out the different themes in a more direct way. It will require a slightly different working relationship though- as i will have to be a bit more directly involved editing wise.

For the last few years I’ve been more of a hunter gatherer. i go out and get the footage then suki pores over it and pieces it together based on our discussions and the footage. I don’t sit with her at the computer all that often- which gives us less room to clash… in this case i will probably put together more of a script as a starting point.

I’ve filmed a lot with Alana over the last few days and want to film a lot more as she is going to europe for the rest of the year. i haven’t gotten into the complexities of her story here but they are a great conduit for exploring a lot of the idea that i want to get to in the film- We’ve gone over a lot of the same information repeatedly but i want to make sure that i get it in a useable way.

When i was in my 20’s and playing in a rock band i never thought about having kids- or even really growing up myself. i spent most of my time chasing creativity. i worked as a messenger, a typist, a production assistant and a sperm donor. As a messenger i reveled in the anonymity and the purposefulness of walking into strange massive buildings in midtown manhattan delivering packages. i would read henry miller on the subway and nod to my fellow messengers in crowded elevators. A lot of the time we weren’t allowed to mix with the office workers and were instead shuttled to messenger centers that invariably didn’t access the glitzy entry way that the real workers passed through. i didn’t mind, i felt uncomfortable in the office buildings and identified as an outsider.

I always had my camera and i took pictures in the empty sterile hallways, crowded streets, and the subways filled with crazies. During the middle of the day the subways weren’t as populated as they are now, and a lot of the people on them were on journey’s to nowhere. My most vivid memory is of a guy who was probably in his late 20’s. he had a long blond beattles haircut and he was wearing a skirt as he smoked a cigarette and hung off the pole in the center of the car. An older woman told him not to smoke and he responded in a drawling English accent, “I’m the queen of England honey.”

A lot of the time i felt a bit like a ghost, somewhat invisible as i floated through the city taking pictures and delivering packages. My pay was 65 dollars a day- and i got 3 dollars extra per delivery to pay for the subway. A lot of the time i would ride my bike to increase my take home pay. if i did three drop offs on one ride i would pocket an extra 9 dollars. If I stopped off at the sperm bank as well i could make 150 dollars that day, and cover my entire rent for the month.

While I tried to work at a job for someone else as little as I possibly could, on the days that I wasn’t working at a job i didn’t sit around watching TV or doing nothing. I wrote, read, took notes, and played music. I also had band practice two or three nights a week. The band was the major focus of my energies, and most of the art that i was working on was related to that. I hand painted t-shirts to sell on tour and i a silkscreened and woodblock printed other shirts.

{ i was working on these thoughts a few weeks ago- before i started the blog- I was doing a lot of reflecting on this time- trying to connect with the person that I was then. Then Alana came over - and sat down at the kitchen table to burn cd’s and make covers out of paper-bags. It’s been very fun to re-live my past through her exciting life these past couple of days.}

I had started my band with two friends three years earlier, when i was a junior in college. i didn’t really know how to play the bass but was fairly obsessed with music. The guitar player, Chris, knew more than me, and he had taught his friend Rachael to play drums that summer. Chris and i listened to a lot of the same music and the first time that we played it felt like we could be a band.

I had started playing bass in high school but never really found anyone that i played well with. I had terrible musical self-esteem. My father didn’t help with this at all. He kind of ridiculed my efforts to play, and the people that i did play with in high school had better skills, so i always felt like the weak link. When I got to college I met Gene, Tom, and Pete, and they all mentored me musically. Gene was the most extreme about it. In the first semester of college he introduced me to literally hundreds of records and dragged me to shows several nights a week. A lot of the music that he and I listened to was based less on musical chops than pushing a musical envelope- music that thought about music in new ways. I found myself re-inspired to make music but it still took me a couple of years to find a situation that worked.

When I came back to college for my junior year I searched out Chris. We had bonded over music the year before and had talked about playing together the next year. He too was excited to give it a try and right away we headed down to the basement to make noise. For the first several months we made played a couple of nights a week. The cinderblock room amplified our already loud exertions and my ears would buzz for hours after we played. Laying in bed. bone tired from too much studying coupled with an exhausting music session, and i would listen to the echoes of the practice as the sound bounced around my head.

After a few months we recorded a few songs and played a few shows. Our first show was in our dorm - we played to about 10 people. Adam Sandler, who also lived in the dorm, opened up for us. As the school year came to a close we made a collective decision to really focus on the band. We decided to move to Providence for the summer and practice a lot.

That summer we lived together, fought a lot, and managed to practice a little and play a few shows. Moving to a smallish town that was had a strong music culture helped us to truly become a band. For many years after that people thought of us as a Providence band. When school started up in the fall, we started to play out a couple of times a month in NY. We would load our equipment into carts from the dorms and push them deep into the East Village to play. We even made a couple of trips to Providence and Boston in a beat up station wagon. A few labels expressed interest in the band and we put out a 7 inch single that got a lot of airplay on college radio. It was time to tour.

I finished school a semester early so i had some free time to work on booking the tour. I had started working at my various jobs, but it was the first time in my life that the responsibilities of school didn’t carry over into my evenings. In addition, my low rent and lack of expenses gave me an incredible sense of freedeom. This was before the internet , so trying to connect with people in other cities took a lot of cold calling and sending out packages. After a few months of trying i was able to book 5 or 6 shows over a two week period. Some of those shows seemed tenuous, but we figured that we could make it work. We rented a van from some friends and set out in late July on an adventure that would change my life.

Our first show was in East Lansing michigan. We played at someone’s house and it was awesome. I don’t think we were paid anything and no one passed a hat- but we sold a bunch of singles and t-shirts - and we were able to stay in the room that we played- so we broke even on gas money.

A couple of summers earlier i had driven across the country with a friend. It was a tough trip. While it was exciting to experience the country, we were aimless and disconnected. We had no way to meet other people, so we floated from town to town on the outside as observers. We stopped at a lot of thrift stores and had a few adventures but i think we were both frustrated rather than enlightened by our journey. I was working on a photo project where I shot photos in malls across the country and it was depressing because they were all so similar. When our car was broken into in San Francisco my friend decided that he wanted to head straight back. The next day we started a driving and went all the way to St. Louis before we stopped- 40 hours straight.

On our first tour as a band we ended up driving straight to the one place in town where we met people that we got along with almost every night. We always found a place to stay, got enough beer to drink, and enough money to pay for gas to the next town. On that trip I met 10 people that are still friends of mine 20 years later.

Hanging out with Alana has been bringing back a lot of memories of that period but also a lot of that energy. I have been shooting a lot and thinking about the film even more.

I made my first post a few days ago. One of the commenters was Alana Sveta. She invited me to use a song of hers for my movie.I listened and was blown away. Turns out that she was on her way from New Orleans to Brooklyn on tour. A few days after writing her comment she was staying at my house and playing with my kids. Turns out her story is amazing - and she is an incredible performer.

SHE PLAYS AT PETE’S CANDY STORE IN BROOKLYN TOMORROW- JUNE 24TH AT 8ISH-
GO SEE HER

Yesterday she helped me work on a different documentary. During a break we walked down to the lab that I used to visit and she turned the camera on me. Last night I filmed her show. This is a song from her show last night that relates to the film. I will be posting a lot of thoughts about meeting with her in the coming days. One of the most amazing things is that she is really living a very similar life to the one that i led 20 years ago in more ways than one. I had been doing some writing about that time - and I am trying to finish a little bit of that thread to post.

In some ways these thoughts seem less relevant to the film- but meeting Alana has made them seem more relevant than ever.

it’s 9am on sunday - father’s day and i have just woken up. With our kids this is a rarity- usually i am up at 7:45 and my wife is up at 6ish.  I get up and take the kids to school or out to play and she goes back to sleep for awhile.

since it’s father’s day they are making me coffee and pancakes.  they don’t know i’m up yet and i can hear them noisily working on it.  It’s so disgustingly cliched but it’s making me happier than you can imagine.

when i woke up i checked my email.  One of the first people to respond to my first post was a musician who also happens to be DC.  I went to the link she provided and was blown away by her music.  As i read about her and her work i was immediately struck by the fact that we would have been friends - and our bands would have played together 20 years ago.  One of the things i have been working on writing wise is that period of my life- and that part will play some small role in the film- specifically because that’s when i was a donor-

As i further looked at her site i realized that she is going to be playing in brooklyn this week so i reached out to her and she got back to me.  I hope that i am able to film with her tomorrow to really jump start the process of making this film.

now i’m going to go downstairs and appreciate being a father.

oops- they yelled me back to bed- i got the breakfast in bed treatment- i had to get them to do it a second time so i could shoot a little video on my photo camera.

Later we had a fun day- and headed back to brooklyn.  On the way back we got a phone call that a building near us had collapsed.  We were worried that the girls would be freaked out- F was she got very emotional about the fact that people lost their homes and that they could have been hurt.  Also when we got home then singer that had contacted me came over.  She’s great and we did some heavy discussing that will certainly end up in the film.

It’s an odd coincidence that i chose to start this blog a couple of day’s before father’s day. it’s also ironic that ever since i started working on this my older daughter F’s attitude and behavior have deteriorated so rapidly. While taking a break from thinking about this essay just now, i read a headline that screamed, “obama asks men to be better father’s than their own”. I’m a pretty good father, and in many ways I do struggle to be better than my own. At the same time, i struggle with many of the same faults that he had- and i wonder how much of this is learned and how much is just in my blood. My father died nearly three years ago, and I have never properly mourned his loss- i know that. I used to talk to him a couple of times a week- and in some ways I still do.

As a father I often project myself into the past and have this odd experience of feeling that i literally am my father. At these time i feel a powerful sense of dejavu and almost feel that i am inside him looking out. Sometimes this happens when I am playing with my kids in the way that my father would play with us. I only have a few photos of being with him when i was young but they trigger powerful sense memories. He would sometimes lay on the floor and flip us over his head with his legs. My twin brother and i screamed with excitement and fought with each other to do it again. My children are the same way, and as I am giddy with joy in these situations I viscerally step outside the experience and feel that i am him- That i am him watching my children- or that i am him playing with me as a child.

On the flip side of that joy is the experience of his rage. My father was a loving parent and a real mensch. However, he wasn’t perfect. He was cheap beyond reason and while he was usually pretty good at keeping his temper in check there were times that he would simply lose it. He would explode with rage when pushed on issues that he didn’t want to be pushed on.

I identify with my father more than my mother, despite probably being a little more like my mother than my father. It might be the fact that I am more innately like my mother, but tried to model myself after my father, that i can get more inside his behaviors than hers- that I can see him in me more so than i can see her in me.

In many ways I’m a lot like my father and my daughter is a lot like me. So when she’s being difficult in a way that I was difficult as a child, I will often concentrate with all of my energy to keep my anger in check. I try to step outside of the situation and realize that she is a child and i am an adult and that i have a powerful responsibility to act like one. A lot of the time I’ll be able to do it. As I groggily changed her sheets when she wet her bed, i was conscious of not even appearing angry because I could remember the shame that I felt as my father threw a towel on my soggy sheets. He wouldn’t yell at us, and was understandably annoyed or tired and probably wasn’t aware of how his mood would affect us in a long term way, but i can still feel his sense of frustration as he got me ready for bed again. As an adult I could totally connect with that energy and I would have to correct myself and make a major effort to be positive. I knew deeply that the negative energy at that vulnerable moment wasn’t insignificant. I knew that i still carried scars from that unconscious behavior. I worked hard to connect with my own childhood feelings to find ways to mitigate the damage that my unthinking adult behavior might have on my child.

Yet there are times that I will lose control and yell at my daughter with a force that simply isn’t fair. When my rage takes over, I find that I can feel empathy for all three of us at once- my father, my daughter, and myself, which helps me to calm that rage. Still, it’s hard to stop the feelings that arise, and at times i simply lose control with F.

There was a period last fall where her defiance got out of control. She was 6 and a half and acted like a 14 year old. She refused to do her school work. She screamed at us, refused to get ready for school, refused to eat what we made for dinner, ate candy when she was told not to, hit her sister and snatched things from her. She refused to take responsibility for anything. It felt like were were in a constant battle with her, and it was almost impossible to have calm in the house. I knew that losing my temper in these situations was the wrong way to go, but i was also at the end of my rope all the time, and my temper got shorter. Regrettably i lost my temper and yelled with way too much force more times than i care to remember.

I also knew that it was our responsibility as parents to fix the situation. One night, a few months into “the terror” she was trying to goad me into fighting with her but i wouldn’t do it. i breathed in deeply and simply asked her why she was trying to get me to fight with her. She screamed and threw things, yet I felt an odd determined calmness. instead of reacting i kept telling her that i wanted to understand what was going on because her reactions made no sense in terms of what i was asking. Finally she broke down crying, and made it clear that she hadn’t felt listened to in a long time. Things had spiraled into a bad place. It was true that we weren’t listening so well, but i tried to help her understand that she also had to be responsible for communicating in way that we could hear her. She seemed to have had a 100 lb. weight lifted from her 45 lb. body by the end our talk.

The defiance leveled off and we got an explosion of anxiety to replace it. A week after our breakthrough F refused to leave the house because she was afraid. She wouldn’t go in the diner because there were cops in the diner and cops had guns and she was afraid of guns. She wouldn’t go anywhere. It was a difficult situation to handle. We didn’t want to be prisoners in the house but the feelings were clearly real so it was hard to force her to do things without ignoring the reality of her terror. She wasn’t putting on an act, she was literally terrified. She started to pick at her fingers and soon they were raw and bleeding all the time. She looked like she’d just seen a ghost most of the time.

The fear quickly spread to school. She was sick with a fever the following Monday and despite being well the following day, refused to go to school. The difficulty of the situation was compounded by the fact that we had a 2.5 year old to get to daycare as well, and F’s reaction to being pushed to do something that scared her was extreme. I knew that some of the behaviors/ issues stemmed from the existence of her sister, but that understanding didn’t make things any easier to deal with. There wasn’t so much anger in the house anymore but there was a lot of frustration.

That day i finally got her to school, but the nurse called within the hour to send her home with a stomach ache. I knew enough to realize that i couldn’t let her stay home. The following day i literally dragged her screaming into school. Everyone had a hard time understanding what was going on because they knew F to be a powerful leader. The behavior baffled everyone from the teachers to the adminstrators to the the other students. The principal heard the commotion and offered to make F her assistant for the day. After that i was able to get her to school but every day was a struggle. She was terrified of seeing a TV because of her fear of guns, and they sometimes watched movies at lunch when it was cold. Every resteraunt and store has a TV now so navigating the city became more difficult. Over the next several months the anxiety and defiance every so slowly diminished with the occasional powerful flare up.

it has been a tough year emotionally. the desire to be a wonderful father smashes up against the realities of life. Time constraints, financial pressures, creative pressures, and other family pressures conspire to make even the best laid plans go a little haywire. In addition to struggling to stay calm and positive while being buffeted about like a matchstick in a hurricane by F’s powerful emotions, i tried to read what i could about the best ways to deal with the situation. In addition to helpful advice, these books that dealt with defiance made me feel a little bit less alone in my struggle.

One friend suggested that we get F evaluated by a HANDLE expert. Handle is an acronym for something that i can’t remember. The quick explanation is that it’s a way of evaluating how the mind and body are working - and where there are weakness’s that might be contributing to emotional and behavioral issues. The evaluation very quickly revealed simple things like the fact that F’s eyes were not working well together, and in fact were competing. When she put on glasses with one red lens and one blue one she saw red and blue rather than purple. when the eyes are working well together they mix the colors. The extra work needed to process information from the separate sources can be exhausting. So we were given some simple exercises to help strengthen that ability. There were also issues with balance. F is incredibly graceful yet the tests revealed that if she wasn’t either at rest or moving at the speed of light her fight or flight response was triggered. It took a month but last weekend the exercises seemed to be taking effect. it was the calmest most pleasant weekend we had had in as long as i could remember. i found myself going hours without being frustrated. it wasn’t a perfect week but it was as good as it has been in a long time.

As I stated at the start of this essay, F’s behavior issues have flared back up a bit, but they seem to be getting back on track already. Tomorrow is father’s day. i look forward to it.

Last night i couldn’t sleep because I kept having ideas about how to put things together. i got up and wrote a lot of it down and it still made sense in the morning.

This morning my younger daughter refused to get in the car to go to school. She is a bit clingy but in general much more easy going than my older daughter. As such, when she gets resistant to something we try to patiently work it out. didn’t happen. After about 10 minutes of complaining my wife had to simply strap her into her seat and close the door. She wailed for the whole 5 minute drive to her sister’s school. I ran my older one inside, and when i got back my younger one was smiling. it was over. I wasn’t all that surprised because she does that. she gets focused on an idea and resists, but at some point she just gives up and isn’t any worse for wear. most of the time we can get her to give up before the screaming fit- but in the end she usually comes around.

The point is- this is how she is and who she is- and while we certainly get better results if we stay calm, positive and firm- she’s going to react to situations the way she’s going to react and it’s going to be different from her sister.

The issue of identity seems to be coming up a lot- a new book came out recently by a gentleman who was donor conceived by his uncle but didn’t find out until he was in his 30’s and didn’t deal with it until he was in his 40’s. He was on the radio today and I heard it in the background as i dealt with my kids. the amazing thing was that a stream of people were calling in to tell their stories. A lot of these people were long time listeners- first time caller- so his story really struck a nerve.

I went to a rock show tonight and it was a bit like a high school reunion- tons of people i hadn’t seen in years - if not a decade- some of them had seen my post via facebook- and a few mentioned hearing this same guy on radio lab yesterday- the media really has a powerful effect especially when it’s magnified by having more than one outlet hit on a similar subject- and this subject seems to really be in the air.

one of the people i hadn’t seen in a while reminded me that he had gone to the lab too. i had totally forgotten that.

i have a lot of thoughts to organize but this process has kicked up so much.

i plan to start doing some shooting next week and will update on the progress of the film.